Name: The Brand Gap
Rating: 4.4 (83 reviews)
Author: Marty Neumeier

What’s in it for me? Learn to close the gap between creativity and strategy to make your brand irresistible.

Understand this: a brand is not a logo, a “corporate identity system” or a product.

A brand is a gut feeling. And you also need to understand that you can’t perfect a brand or control it.

What you can do, however, is ensure your company does business in a way that customers understand and appreciate. When you do this, you’ll find that your customers will develop a gut feeling about your business – and that feeling is your brand.

These blinks will explain the five branding disciplines you need to follow to instill in your customers that positive gut feeling about your company that you want them to have.

In the following blinks, you’ll also learn:

why John Deere doesn’t offer real estate;
why ducks should swim like ducks; and
why Coca-Cola’s brand represents more than half its actual value.

Become a charismatic brand by closing the “brand gap” between strategy and creativity.

Believe it or not, the Coca-Cola brand is worth $70 billion – a figure that represents 60 percent of the company’s total value!

And Coca-Cola isn’t alone. Today, the measure of any company’s value lies in the strength of its brand.

So how do you go about building a strong brand? Start by closing the brand gap, or the gap between strategy and creativity.

Here’s how the brand gap works in many companies. Left-brained strategy people work together, perhaps in the marketing department. These employees tend to be analytical, verbal and logical.

Meanwhile, the design department is exclusively populated by right-brained creatives. These employees are more intuitive, with strong spatial and visual skills.

And whenever tension happens between these two polarized groups, you end up with a brand gap.

Perhaps you’ve experienced this in your own workplace. Have you ever developed a highly sophisticated strategy that, upon execution, just doesn’t connect with customers? That’s likely due to the brand gap.

Ultimately, this phenomenon poses a major problem, because without a unified brand, your company simply won’t be able to compete in the marketplace.

Look at it this way: Companies with a brand gap can’t communicate who they are, so they don’t build a strong relationship to customers. And since customers don’t know what to expect, they won’t consistently buy the company’s products.

But in the case of charismatic brands, there’s little so-called psychic distance between customers and companies. In other words, customers have a solid relationship with a company and know what to expect from its products.

For example, companies like Coca-Cola, Apple and Nike have achieved this by establishing brands that communicate ideas of joy, beauty and style – all things people want for themselves. The goal of any brand is to develop this kind of aspirational, appealing identity and to communicate it consistently.

Each and every charismatic brand today has mastered the five disciplines of branding, which you’ll learn about in the upcoming blinks.

Successful brands know what they do and why it matters, and importantly, they stick to it!

Humans are hardwired to pay attention to the unexpected. For our ancestors, this was a survival strategy, a way of scoping out potential threats.

Today your brand can use this impulse to attain a competitive advantage. That’s why differentiation – being unusual and different – is the first discipline of any successful brand.

Use validation tests to figure out whether your branding elements and messages work.

In the old days, brands mostly engaged in one-way communication with consumers. But today, brand-customer communication is more of a feedback loop. When your company sends out a message, you get a response!

And this more interactive mode of communication is exactly why the fourth brand discipline, validation, is so critical.

By cultivating your brand, you can ensure it perpetuates itself without becoming stale or boring.

How do brands perpetuate themselves? Once you have a handle on the first four brand disciplines, you have to cultivate your brand and keep it alive.

Even for the world’s most famous companies, it isn’t enough to have an iconic brand – you have to have a living brand.

Key ideas in The Brand Gap

What is The Brand Gap about?

In The Brand Gap, you’ll get the inside scoop on how a strong brand can give your company a competitive edge. When you learn how to implement the five branding disciplines outlined in this book, you’ll understand that in closing the gap between strategy and creativity, you’ll be able to build an irresistible brand that will make customers take notice.